The Mob at the Embassy

It’s no secret that Americans are fairly unpopular in Iran’s official circles. Ever since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979, overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah and replaced his dynasty with a theocratic dictatorship, the official moniker in Iran for the United States has been “the Great Satan.” The ritualized hatred of the perfidious Yankees is acted out on live national television during weekly Friday prayer sessions, attended by a panoply of leading ayatollahs and government ministers, in which chants of “Death to America” are an essential part of the liturgy. But Iranians of a certain type have always reserved their greatest fear and loathing for the British, their onetime colonial masters, whom they regard as still preëminent in affairs of global nefariousness—with the Americans merely acting as their performing monkeys.

That may help explain why, in a brief reprise of the four hundred and forty-four-day U.S. hostage crisis of three decades ago, the British Embassy in Tehran was stormed Tuesday by Iranian “students.” They were able to run amok—burning a vehicle, smashing windows, tearing down the Union Jack and raising the Iranian flag, as well as apparently destroying official documents—before Iranian police finally intervened and removed them from the premises. The intrusion came just days after Her Majesty’s government signed a stringent sanctions package into law—suspending all contacts with Iran’s banking system—following an I.A.E.A. report that raised new concerns about Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions. A few days ago, Iran announced it was expelling the British Ambassador. Then came the attack on the Embassy.

The British Embassy, located on a central boulevard in midtown Tehran (officially renamed Bobby Sands Avenue some years ago, in order to provoke the British) is a remarkably historic place, a legacy of the days in which Tehran was a livable, even attractive city of villas and trees rather than a sprawling metropolis with congested traffic and unlovely apartment towers. Occupying an entire city block, the embassy’s grounds are park-like and shaded with old trees, and the legation itself, a single-story story wooden mansion dating back to the Qajar dynasty, is a delightful building furnished with priceless Persian carpets woven expressly for its rooms; its walls adorned with oil paintings of great historic value. On a visit there several years ago, the-then British Ambassador showed me around and allowed me to leaf through some photo albums on a side table; they contained the originals of the famous snapshot portrait from the Tehran conference of the Big Three, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, held from November 28 to December 1, 1943.

During their summit, the leaders held talks at both the Soviet and the British embassies. It must have seemed appropriate, since the two nations were in effective control of Iran after invading it together in 1941 and forcing the ouster of its pro-German leader, Reza Shah, in favor of his son Mohammed Reza Shah. Walking me out to the wide colonnaded verandah, the Ambassador led me to a certain spot and then told me that I was standing in the precise place where Stalin had stood for one of the photo sessions. It was there in Tehran, he reminded me, that the three Allied leaders had begun to plot strategy for the war against Hitler. There, they had also agreed in principle to the formation of a future United Nations that would vouchsafe peace and security in the postwar world.

To certain Britons, the enduring Iranian conspiracy theories about them are a source of some pride and quaint nostalgia, a reminder of a time in which Great Britain was central to world politics, rather than a receding bit player. For some Iranians, similarly, who look back to a long-ago time when their nation ruled over a great swath of Central Asia, the British are a convenient target for historical grievances, and Iran’s nuclear program is a means to restore their country to its rightful place amongst the world’s leading nations. But today’s scene was not just about those two nations: it was a new and poignant reminder of the limitations of international diplomacy in an increasingly polarized world in which rampaging mobs, for some countries, have effectively replaced foreign policy.